BBS: The Documentary

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Q&A

Did people run BBSes on Linux?

Fidonet

Introduction

Connecting sysops to other sysops
"First ability to be in broader community like the Internet is today"
Not novel but available to "a whole new group of people"
Circumventing expensive phone calls
"Fido brought Bulletin boards into the modern era"

Tom Jennings develops first Fido BBS

Worked at Phoenix software in 1980s
Learned I/O programming on 8086 machines
Understanding hardware independence
Wrote a bulletin board using I/O layer he used at Phoenix
- Connected to people who had DEC Rainbow (John Madill, Fido #2)
Lots of Fido boards
- Expensive, so he developed a "bulletin board to bulletin board message thing"

Ben Baker, "Wouldn't it be neat if our boards could call each other up and exchange messages. Maybe exchange files?"

New ver of Fido BBS could connect to other Fidos: Fidonet

Distributed Fidonet and node list with a new version of Fido
Building a "big autonomous machine"
Sent messages among BBSes
Node list kept by hand

Tom Jennings is a bridge:

From Boston
Wrote Fido BBS, then started Fidonet, 1984
Worked at Apple, 1985
Worked at Cygnus, 1991
Part of Bay area punk, early 90s
Started a "radical, grassroots" ISP in SF, 1992-1996

Users take over maintenance

Ben Baker, Ken Kaplan takes over nodelist's maintenance
How does this match or depart from Free software?

Fido improved

Fido users gather to work on the problem

They "took off work" to fix the scaling issue
Regions, nets
- NCAA
This solution lasted 20 years
- Each BBS get a note Zone 1, Net 107, Node 27 (1:107/27)
- 1984, 132 nodes
- 1995, 35,787 nodes

Echo

Sub-boards

Fido memories

Ben Baker "I was never a BB sysop. I was into the technology."

Thom Henderson

Recalls a Saudi Arabia Fidonet to communicate with soldiers in Desert Storm

Daniel O'Leary

"Projecting your presence vicariously out and you have no idea how far it goes"

Ed Williams

A newsgroup with a "to:" field
Novel experience: public/private message

Ryan de Laplante

2 day cycle for messages to traverse an unknown distance

Rick Siegel

Met with the Fido people offline, one Tuesday a month

Justin Cohen

Used nodelist to find local BBSes and meet people while traveling

Irene Henderson

Hosted traveling sysops (from Australia)
"Real people with real jobs at real companies"

John Madill

Businesses used it to communicate among locations

Wynn Wagner III (Opus software developer)

Doctor in Vietnam used Fidonet because Internet was censored
Doctor got HIV information via BBSes

Dissolution of collaboration

TJ: "People perceive inside and outside"

Once it got big enough that people weren't working face to face

How did FOSS avoid this?

TJ: "We don't need to agree. We shouldn't have to agree. The protocols have to work."

IFNA: Int'l FidoNet Association

Like the ARRL
Lobbyists
501(c)3 non-profit org to recieve money for Ken Kaplan
- KK spent all the cash on fees, postage, phone bills
Tech assistance
Hobbyist org

IFNA reaction

People feared it was ruining Fidonet
Stealing money
Thought Ken was picking and choosing who can be in and out
Thought they were "stealing" Fidonet
People were fearful that IFNA had single point of control for Fidonet
- TJ: "Nice idea... ill-conceived"
- Exposed weaknesses in Fidonet design

TJ: "[Fidonet] runs in spite of the idiots"

Fido News

Tim Pozar

Fidocon

Community management

How did Fidonet battles presage web board flamewars?
Do the early sysops have knowledge about running boards?
Why aren't THEY the social media experts?

Fidonet in 2002

Mike Lynn

More mature user base
"Parallels to ham radio and other hobbies"

(Daniel O'Leary ?)

"Dwindling breed but stubborn"